Love-song to a stranger

Because this song has influenced my life so much and also the title of this poem.




-I-

Blue sunlight on lotus leaves,

leaves and prayer,

someone flits across the hyacinth door of sleep.

Rub out the poison from your eyelashes,

and watch the doorways turn into infinite mirrors,

pluck out the images,

the silken lust of poison in breath

and the slow decay of the empire beneath the gown.

A million conquests won or lost in bed,

as you hide your soul of bells

beneath the blue umbrella of sleep.

Like the wild autumnal fantasies in your eyes

or the rainbows spilled on  the liquid walls of time,

a stranger flows like the wild river at sunset,

beneath the street-lamp.

-II-

The street-lamp travels through sand and glass.

The street-lamp yawns and falls like time

from Naera’s hair,

across the cosmic music of the stranger’s lips.

Her lips conceal a violet prayer

for the earth,

her eyes like a Grecian stalk conceals

the unsaid spectrum of lust.

Cars of sand triumph through constellations,

lyre of the scorpion rose in the glass,

a smudged factory of dreams.

The house beneath the blue dress

falsifies salvation,

an endless portal of desire.

If you could sing to me in sleep,

like the street-lamp engaged in the shameful act,

trembling beneath its innocent horror of thwarted escape.

If you could welcome me beneath the fancy lights

and show me your eyes are also the mirrors of dancers,

and if you only knew that my eyes are also blades

whose tendrils can grasp like infant claws

and fracture the quiet solitude of the evening.

Beyond this partial horror and ecstasy

of this enormous, soft lucidity,

we descend.

Like the soul of sparrows in twilight,

we descend.

For the unmanageable weakness of our body,

we descend.

Across that enigmatic horror of that smile in Louvre,

we descend.

Across the smokefall of future,

the embrace of salt and germanium laughters,

the shrieking voices and slow rotation of the stars,

our speech borrowed from frozen savages

and the soundless withering of daily time,

our descension has the flavour of an untamed prayer.

And when June is a hot baked moon

swelling through the dried semen on the street-lamp,

renunciation is only soft retaliation in bed.

The smell of the afternoon bursts like an elegy,

in the calamitous purple mask of women

dressed with futureless laughter and etiquette,

only to drop their masks with their gowns in bed.

Your beauty is dangerous in the voice of the street-lamp,

your fragile lips calculating wreckage of history

is a partial fallacy in your notion of existence.

Fulfillment comes like a naked shriek of the Ganges,

and across Seine, Thames or the Nile,

your halogen grin electric under the street-lamp

is a destroyer of primitive fancy.

Lady, on a drummer’s voyage,

at the shrine of orange ships that sail for future,

light the harpsichord with omens

at the half union of the womb.

This semi-automatic dream shall wreck you

across the temporal illusion of music

and the wild incantation of lust.

Yet heedless my soul,

heedless the fleet of eyes.

The rhythm fallen from her sleeve,

her enchantment inching towards liberation;

her bosom expanding like an empire,

the hollow pail of her voice receiving inwards,

the liquid spiral of her breath like a henchman’s reins.

These are the streets I visit and re-visit in sleep

for re-incarnation.

Children playing in golden breeze on pavements

while the asphalt tongue of time licks up the dust

of the uncertain hour,

the dark caverns of her breast

evaporate language from the eyes

as the dead tongue of time is suspended in un-belief,

green pastures of your mother’s voice,

the metal cries of women washing clothes,

the spectral honking along un-existing streets

are all like rehearsed fragments of horror.

What exists can’t always be real…

And then her bosom falls

with the soundless finality of a death-knell.

Three contradictions of sorrow:

between the scarecrow and the sky,

between the language and final motion

(commotion, motion and disdain)

and between the lip and the lip.

All is silent,

As Beethoven comes to the ear

like a wisp of fantasy.

Between the dead choir of memory

and painful aftermath of speech,

the girl is stranded at the hyacinth door,

naked beneath the glance of the street-lamp,

and the endless flowering of eyes

as a witness to the lust of her existence,

frozen symbol of ice,

the onslaught of aqueous eyes 

like a train at the door of sleep,

Scorching glance of the sky,

scorching glance of  the street-lamp,

my eyes leave my body.

A million weapons of vision exalted at the death of time,

incandescent tongue of time defeated in fire,

caresses along the soft, suffering epitaph,

noiseless wars beneath the gown,

along the soft corners of sleep,

the faint tremor that runs

along her body.

“Yet stop”,

cries the street-lamp,

“Stop”

echoes the sky.

My eyes blinded by the language of rock,

shakes and falls like an ageing leaf.

To begin at the beginning

is to end without ending.

The street-lamp travels through sand and glass.

-III-

Awake. Arise.

Yet this is not sleep,

this is not the pain of birth or death,

this is not the supernatural destination of the mind.

This is the fear of consummation

falling through the dark throat  of time.

“You shall not touch the wind,”

the street-lamp cried.

“Your body will shield our fortunes

at the funeral of water and life

before we pawn your body to the devil

who builds a flute with soul of murdered cats.”

The stranger I met that violet afternoon

is a distant chord of ash,

violins burnt on the walls of sleep

echo the chorus of the winds:

“Dove on the horizon of memory

Whirl now in a vortex of motion and emotion

The first panther that died at dawn

Will purge you beyond the dancer’s body.”

My arms tied from pole to pole,

as long as the music lasts (or the lust in bed),

the lamp-post, the sky and the earth

will torture me with strange history of my genesis.

Zero-th façade, Zero-th time, Zero-th lust,

let’s start again.

Let’s play a game, just you and me.

Imagine for a start you love me,

you might think that May comes after December,

or we eat with broomsticks if you want,

but it’s important you imagine.

Now imagine the cellophane song of spring,

(it’s just a memory game, mind you

so why bother;

(yes, straighten your hair a bit

and loosen your dress if it’s too hot,

for it’s really summer you know

and I am not staring)

(Not that I won’t like to kiss you

(even though I don’t love you

but after an entire evening together

and a kiss, who knows)

(I’d like to actually stare while you’re undressing

and imagine my body pressed against yours,

my palms sliding like water across your breasts,

my thighs pressed against your vagina)

No, I never said that, I was just thinking

and even if I did, it’s none of your business,

you indolent slut, stop intruding)

just stare at me and think)

and yes, where were we?

Ah, yes, the cellophane song of spring,

and…

“Stop wandering away” commanded the street-lamp,

“You’ll think what we want you to.”

Oh! The endless loops,

and the tragedy of being lost in them,

makes me wonder what is real.

“Of course, we’re real”, cried the street-lamp.

“Of course, we’re real”, cried the earth, the sea and the sky,

“And we are glad to use this light,

to light your soul,

now spread out in arms in crucifixion.”

(Only if it were so, as they think,

but I’m deluded, so let’s give it a try)

“Now Zero-th time. Zero-th space,

Stare at me”, cried the street-lamp,

“What do you see?”

Soft fibrils of pre-natal night,

mixed dread of comfort and alienation.

 A dark room furnished with the language of love,

water, blood and fluid guard the solitude

and the fear of language ebbing through synapses.

“Re-wind, drift like a speck of dust and anamnesis,

what do you see?”

Speech breaks down here, at the holy moment

through the music of throbbing body and falling stars,

the star, shrouded in white mist, comes like a sacrifice;

the star travels worlds in sleep through time

and the intersection of endless spaces

where the Oedipal streets crumble to dust,

it transcends and merges like faith

into another world.

Sunlight chokes on hidden laughter,

Word moves word, thought moves thought.

“These are then sins of the air”, the street-lamp cried.

“I wheel with the slow burden of sin,

the slow and rotting burden of flesh,” cried the earth

my efforts are a cyclic failure.”

“Like Sisyphus’ arm, you are cursed forever,

and I, like the nonchalant stranger in sleep

shall shoot till death.”     

The cellophane song of spring,

(let us imagine)

my palms sliding like water across your breasts

(let us imagine)

melting banks in the wreckage of the violin

(let us…

In the last failed effort of resuscitation,

the street-lamp, the sky and the earth surround me.

“Last chariot of peace, curse thee.”

“Last fantasy of soul, desert thee

“First chariot of love, heal thee.”

Words sting me

like a spirit stung by holy water.

“And you will be Demogorgon”,

the sky said to the street-lamp.

“And I shall be love, while you

freed of your daily burden, can hope.”

My eyes blinded forever, collapses

like the fallen star.

The epilepsy of sleepless nights,

the narcotic pleasure of vision,

and the soft rustle of hallucinatory motions all lost.

With my eyes, we all fall through memory.

The safety of the phantom mind is guarded by seals,

on the rock on the sea protected by the hyacinth oars.

While we all drown in the tendency of conscious art

and mystery of vision,

hymns of the lamp-post soothe the mind.

Incense stick, candles and holy water,

prayers written to the lamp-post

for healing the ghosts of vision.

To heal is also to kill

(The cellophane song,

Your thighs against my…

Ah well!

 Hallowed be thy name!

-IV-

June evening. 4 p.m.

The stranger flows like the wild river at sunset,

beneath the street-lamps.

Rest in peace.